Fondazione Giuliani is very pleased to present Turcato, a solo exhibition dedicated to one of post-war Italy’s most inventive artists. Bringing together almost three decades of work, the exhibition explores Giulio Turcato’s use of the monochrome not as a reductive gesture, but as a rich field for investigating colour and material. Beginning in the early 1960s, Turcato’s monochromes become sites of transformation where paint and texture expand the possibilities of painting.
Turcato’s position within Italian and international art was marked by both radical political engagement and formal innovation. In 1947, alongside Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli and Antonio Sanfilippo, he co-founded FORMA 1, a group that challenged the dominant Communist insistence on figuration. His early work after World War Two reveals a restlessness between abstraction and realism, shaped by a desire to find a personal visual language in a period of profound cultural redefinition.
Turcato also looked beyond Italy toward the new centre of the art world: New York. With his first trip to the United States in 1962, Turcato observed the innovations of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, whose use of alternative materials and engagement with the everyday paralleled his own investigations. There are also interesting connections to be made with Robert Ryman’s explorations, and those of Alberto Burri and Enrico Castellani in Italy, who experimented in their own ways with chromatic and achromatic tones, the colour white, and the building up of painted surfaces with assorted media.
The monochrome served Turcato not as an endpoint, but as a point of departure. Where other artists used monochrome to evoke spiritual purity or conceptual stillness, Turcato filled the surface with experimentation. He rejected the canvas as a flat support and worked instead with sculptural reliefs, gouged foam, phosphorescent dust, pills, coins, and carbon paper. These materials – often pulled directly from the world around him – transformed his works into material codes for understanding the natural world. From plants and minerals to ruins and bacteria, Turcato’s practice filtered life itself through the lens of artistic reinvention. His art became a form of knowledge, capable of expressing systems through colour and form.
The artist’s exploration of a colour ‘beyond the spectrum’ in his series Fuori dallo spettro, from 1962, to Oltre lo spettro in the 1970s, appear on one level to be in dialogue with Mario Schifano’s monochromes, which focus purely on colour, and on another level to move into the realm of Turcato’s metaphysical search for a ‘colour that doesn’t exist’. In the Cangianti series, this idea is taken further: pigments react to light and movement, some of which are visible even in darkness. These surfaces are no longer static, since they change as the viewer moves past them, creating shifting fields of light and reflection.
The artist’s Superfici lunari of the 1960s evoke the unknown texture of extraterrestrial landscape, as though taking Lucio Fontana’s Spatialist experiments into a different physical space, where colour, light, and material express new dimensions of perception. In the Cangianti, colour is worked and layered until it becomes almost immaterial. However, Turcato’s emphasis on material never disappears: even in the most reductive monochromes, there remains a density of surface, a chromatic vibration that ties each painting to the body, to space, and to lived experience.
Through his sustained engagement with the monochrome, Turcato developed a thoughtful approach to the possibilities of painting. Rather than seeking grand statements, they open quiet spaces for reflection, encouraging viewers to consider how colour and form can shape the way we see the world around us.
The exhibition is curated by Martina Caruso and Adrienne Drake.